EAP state machine question

[Jouni Malinen]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 08:31:43PM -0700, Chuck Tuffli wrote:

> I'm implementing a new EAP type and in a certain state, want the EAP method to restart the PAE state machine (ie PAE should disconnect and start scanning). Setting portEnabled to FALSE seems to get the PAE back to the DISCONNECTED state, but the PAE doesn't appear to transition into CONNECTING as I expected. Literally all the state calls is eapol_set_bool(). Does there also need to be a call to eapol_sm_step()? Is there a better way to do this from one of the other state machines (BE or PAE)?

EAP method should not really depend on there being a PAE state machine
running it and in general, the less direct accesses there are to
internal variables of other components the better.. I don't think there
is this type of functionality available for an EAP method, so at
minimum, this will likely require changing EAP interfaces and this may
indeed be easier to handle in EAPOL code (with a new interface to
trigger this from EAP code).

I'm not completely sure what you mean with "PAE should disconnect and
start scanning", so I may have missed something. Which scanning is this
referring to? If this is related to actually disconnecting and
re-associating (i.e., IEEE 802.11 functionality, not EAPOL). It may be
enough to just return failure from the EAP method to trigger this type
of re-connection to the same AP (assuming no other networks are enabled
at the same time).

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA